Dance to Your Daddy
by rednightmare
Summary: Charlie sings herself to sleep under the plate-glass eyes of Mr. Bubbles.


**Dance to Your Daddy**

Rapture was a noisy place.

Outsiders oft pictured the marine haven of mogul Andrew Ryan as a peaceful, slumbering palace; a brass-plated Taj Mahal befriended by trolling whales, nebulous clouds of shoaling damselfish or yellow-fin tuna, its windows caked with anemone that flowered in every color of the rainbow. Coral glowed against artificial lights, mollusks adhered themselves in communes upon bubbling pipes. Nurse sharks bedded upon silt-covered ceilings. Unbeknownst and uncaring to the oppressive bustle of surface politics, this city nestled beneath the kelp was assumed to burble along, somnolent. Its capitalist verve was dampened by saltwater and tons of dream-sequence ocean.

They were most thoroughly mistaken.

Steamlines regularly burst, Atlantic gushed through exterior cracks, industrial screws unwound themselves below the combined pressure of ten million species. Valves clinked and clapped. Leaks dripped incessantly. Neglected picture frames slipped their moorings, jangling impotently to the ground. Dishware splintered, fine china burst against dusty floorboards like landmines, merlot splattered down the sides of failing liquor cabinets. Bloody-lipped inhabitants spun their vinyl and cackled in that inane discourse of the mad. This was no sleepy, soundless giant dragging its feet through the algae and sand. No – Rapture clanked, hissed, planked and clattered through its suffocating nights – rattling a dirge beneath the crushing force of deep, inhuman blue.

Rapture was a noisy place, and it was hard for Charlie to sleep.

Mr. Bubbles tried to be very careful when she settled down for naptime. He never revved the rust-stained drilltip; fought to keep the clunky ridges and obstinate corners of his great, hulking body perfectly still. It was a difficult task. The Big Daddy remembered little behind his foggy, multi-faceted orb of face – language deteriorated to primate grunts and droning whalesong – but he knew well how Rapture's macabre, myriad sounds echoed with danger. Every suspicious _clitter-clack_ rung in his helmet like a wrench head; each high-pitched sapien wail ricocheted between massive shoulder-blades as a threat. One unsuspected yowl of a frothing, feral cat and the docile Mr. B would feel a savage thunder rage up through steel-infused bones – would whirl about like a wrecking ball, ramming his revolving lance into the nearest shadow – organs hammering against diving mesh. He did not like to scare Charlie. Her screams were the worst, most gut-searing sounds of them all… but he _knew_ that Andrew Ryan's glitzed metropolis was no longer a safe place for small, sweet, apricot-haired baby girls.

He also knew that Little Sister became very cranky when she missed her afternoon snooze. This meant _temper tantrums_. "Temper tantrums" were when she liked to dash away from him, the hem of her sky-colored dress flitting around dark corners, fly-fishing with poor Mr. Bubbles's bison heart. He'd sense his own anger crusting – want to snort his frustration, bang fist-to-breastplate in a futile demand for obedience – but was too afraid it would toll a dinner bell to the slavering wolves. So all the Big Daddy could do was throw his monstrous, colossus frame into an ungainly run, unintended speeds tripping him every step until the creature inevitably fell forward like a timbering redwood.

Charlie would giggle in a moment of wicked, childlike satisfaction at her panicked sentinel's lumbering struggle to right himself. Then she would scurry over on dainty, dirt-speckled soles and kiss the creature's kneecaps as though he'd taken an innocent spill onto schoolyard blacktop, declaring their truce with a clinical, "All better!"

Like any wide-eyed girl, she does not comprehend the consequence.

Little Sister was very naughty when she did things like that. This was why Mr. Bubbles' organic hodgepodge of insides winced every time he made an accidental '_bang!' _that stirred her from the arms of slumber.

"_Shh_! Daddy, sit down! Your shoes are too loud," Charlie scolded through an annoyed yawn. The child tossed a wrist over her kitten nose, rooting tenaciously into the ragged pallet of derelict coats she'd made. Faded white ribbons twisted in a mop of autumn red. "You have to tiptoe when somebody's sleeping," she went on to explain, mildly exasperated with her well-meaning yet stone-dull surrogate parent. "But you're so clumsy, Mr. B. So you have to sit and be quiet with all the other children."

The Big Daddy, only dimly aware of any context behind her instructions, looked around anxiously. He did not really want to sit down – not when it took the metal-clad guardian so many precious minutes to heft himself back to a menacing full height. It was easier to protect Charlie upright, standing stiff like some military night watchman, permitting her doze in the attentive security of his Mary Shelley shadow. He could peer with more certainty past those shady crags, single-nimbus flashlight boring through musty air. His drill reached farther, elbow swung harder, corrugated nozzle of the limb-turned-siege-weapon whirring deeper into gales of rippled cruor and horrified flesh.

"Don't worry, Daddy," Little Sister promised. There was a hazy assurance in the vulpine yellow eyes that consoled him more than it ought. "It's safe to rest here."

Mr. Bubbles did not move for a long second of deliberation. Then, knees locking like a folding chair, the copper titan quaked their quiet antechamber as armor-and-tiles connected most unceremoniously.

"Daddy!" the girl cried, disbelieving, tiny hands splayed over both ears when he emitted an acquiescing groan. Her brows wrinkled in concentrated reprimand. "Don't you know what 'inside voices' means?"

A series of helpless clicks from beneath the opaque diver's mask was answer enough. Charlie sighed, her young nerves tested. An alarm-pink sea snail was currently worming its way up a glass panel eight inches from the child's face.

"Never mind," she decided, hefting up a fistful of blanket to abandon her makeshift cocoon. Plaid-patterned cloth dragged lamely through the layers of grime. Five steps had taken Little Sister across cold linoleum diamonds and into her father's lap, half-sleeping, using the ribs upon his torso like ladder rungs with practiced confidence. Mr. B's clamorous right arm formed a reflexive cradle in which she settled comfortably, completely indifferent towards the blood-browned construction apparatus that now supported two petite white feet. Charlie wiggled her toes against one barbaric groove as though to prove a point.

"I can't get to dreamland," the girl complained, thin lips curling into a pout. She rubbed the hardening mucus away from smoky corners of her eyes. "Missus Tenenbaum used to sing to us before bedtime in the Kindergarten. I never liked her very much – not like _you_, Daddy. She smelled like shots and monster closets and old peppermint. But her songs were nice. Will you sing me a lullaby? It doesn't have to be about princesses or prancing ponies," Charlie added at her guardian's low drawl of bewilderment.

The Big Daddy shifted its mechanized joints disconcertedly. Mr. Bubbles did not know exactly what it was Little Sister had commanded him to do, but felt distress at being unable to please her. His hollowed-out ghost of a mind racked itself through decayed passages, searching brail archives, striking flint to synapses long-dead. "Lullaby" did not retain any special significance for the iron-clad homunculi – let alone "princesses" or "ponies." Yet those tapered eyes still blinked expectantly at him from beneath thick lashes. Upset, neoprene lungs pushed out one doleful, apologetic note; it struck air like a bass horn, all baleen and oil tanker.

"That's not very pretty, Mr. B," Charlie gently observed. She patted his gauntleted cuffs in forgiveness. "Maybe I'll just sing to you, instead."

Little Sister tapped out rhythm on the Big Daddy's pauldron, pads of four skeletal fingers skirting the large crack left yesterday by a Splicer's sawed-off.

Her voice was crystalline, bell-like, cauterizing.

_You are my sunshine, my only sunshine  
You make me happy when skies are gray.  
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you.  
Please don't take my sunshine away.  
I'll always love you and make you happy  
If you will only say the same.  
But if you leave me and love another,  
You'll regret it all someday.  
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine  
You make me happy when skies are gray.  
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you.  
Please don't take my sunshine away._

"The End," Charlie proudly announced, clearing her throat into a well-used dress sleeve. She then grappled onto Mr. Bubbles' helmet cage, icicle digits wrapping around flaking bronze bars, and pressed a kiss into the cold glass roundabout where she imagined his nose would be. "I love you, Daddy. Sweet dreams."

Little Sister had already burrowed contentedly back into the nook of her keeper's elbow, temple cushioned by micro-weave mesh, eyes closed. Mr. B. studied the minute circular prints she'd left on his gated heume; traced these infinitesimal lines of grease that identified her. Something ancient about Charlie's nursery song had lit up the sandy corridors of his mind like jellyfish swarms, scattering bright points across checkerboards of blanked-out memoirs. Echoes of her delicate scales still reverberated off the high-ceilinged foyer. Its sorrowful, siren notes made a distant fragment of the Big Daddy's shambled sense of self want to _remember_. Vague recollections evaded him through the thick miasma of Rapture – wildly jumbled scents, tastes and textures – a salvo of forfeited sensations now too complex for his primordial intellectual capacity. It could have enraged him… _should_ have enraged him, sent enormous fists jackhammering into concrete.

Mr. Bubbles found he didn't care very much about all that mess, anymore. Cartoon glove fingers stroked themselves through ginger hair, indebted, reverently following the curve of Little Sister's sallow cheek. Meanwhile, her song resounded within his cranium – memory bank unable to retain anything beyond the first infant line – lyrics repeating like a carnival march.

You are my sunshine.

You are my sunshine.

You are my sunshine.


End file.
